Hundreds of knee-high trees, in various states of arboreal surgery, were lined up on benches and beer crates. Neil later likened the moment to peering into the mind of a mad genius. The group was met by one of Kimura’s apprentices and ushered past rows of ancient and pristinely shaped bonsai into the back garden-the workshop-where few visitors were allowed. It was a cool, gray morning Neil wore a hoodie. On the second day of the trip, the group visited Kimura’s garden, in a rural area some thirty miles northwest of Tokyo. Neil signed up for the tour of Japan during his sophomore year, and took a short leave from school. While other students were partying, he stayed home looking at bonsai blogs, or drove his pickup truck to remote mountain locations in search of wild miniature trees. He helped take care of the university’s bonsai collection and travelled around the West Coast to attend master classes with renowned practitioners. Neil went to college at California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, where he majored in horticulture and studied Japanese. At the time, some fifty people had begun working under Kimura, but only five had completed the apprenticeship, all of them Japanese. Bonsai apprenticeships could last anywhere between five and ten years. Neil knew that the work would not be easy. Near the end of high school, Neil laid out a meticulous long-term plan that would culminate in his travelling across the Pacific to apprentice under Kimura, who was considered the toughest bonsai master in Japan. As Neil saw it, Kimura had given the tree not just a new shape but a soul. A scruffy, shapeless plant had become a cantilevered sculpture. (Kunio Kobayashi, one of Kimura’s chief rivals at the time, called him “the kind of genius who comes along once every hundred years, or maybe more.”) The article described how Kimura had transformed and refined a small juniper tree that had been collected in the wild. One day, after seeing bonsai for sale at a local fair, he rode his bike to the library, checked out every book on bonsai, and lugged them all home.Ībout a month later, he got his hands on a trade magazine, Bonsai Today, which featured an article about Masahiko Kimura, the so-called magician of bonsai, who is regarded by many enthusiasts as the field’s most innovative living figure. Miyagi, practices the art of bonsai, and in Neil’s young mind it came to represent a romantic ideal: the pursuit of perfection through calm discipline. In the films, the wise karate instructor, Mr. He was especially fond of the third movie in the series, which features dreamy shots of characters rappelling down a cliff face to collect a miniature juniper. Like many Americans of his generation, Neil had discovered bonsai through the “Karate Kid” films.
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